This is an open letter to the editors/admins of Open Salon. I also emailed a copy to Joan Walsh at her salon [dot] com address. Update: Joan replied promptly and said they're working on it.

I've been a member of Open Salon since the beta, and I really enjoy blogging and reading there. I've seen the various challenges the community has faced, and now I want to bring your attention to the latest thing plaguing our little community: comment spam bots.

Here's an example of a comment spam bot: http://open.salon.com/blog/kjhdfkjhskdjfs

He/she has registered an account with no intention of posting. Instead, as you look at this person's recent comments you will see that they are copy-pasting the same spam into various comments around the site.

This is rapidly becoming an epidemic. 50% of the comments on my latest post were actually spam bots. I am trying to delete them as fast as they appear, but it's hard to catch the ones that pop up in older posts. Look around the site - they appear on almost every post these days.

Here's what you need to do in order to help combat this problem:

1) Have a better system for users to flag accounts suspected as spam bots. Currently you can only flag problematic posts, not accounts. Have a dedicated admin to handle these accounts, someone who can rapidly act to ban these accounts as they appear. It is intolerable that these accounts remain active days after their obvious spam patterns emerge.

2) Consider changing the code on the site to detect people who post comments in suspicious patterns - rapidly commenting on multiple posts at a time, obvious copy-paste patterns in their recent comments. Ban users not only by username, but by IP address as well.

3) Give users better control in their "Manage Comments" area of their profile. Currently when I log on, I can only see the following headings in that area: Date, Post, Comment. I'd like an additional column for "Poster Name", so I can easily weed out the suspicious looking people (like our friend I linked to above).

3a) Also, consider allowing the user to expand the full comment. The newest tactic by the spam bots involves putting in 2-3 lines of legitimate looking commentary, followed by links to possibly malicious sites. For example, the commenter might write, "Great article! I found it very informative. Go here to buy cheap shoes ". When browsing my "Manage Comments" section, it's hard to pick out which comments are legit and which aren't, because I only see those first 6-7 words.

It is vitally important that OS addresses this issue ASAP. Part of the reason OS is such a great place to blog is because we have such a great community of members who engage in thoughtful debates in the comments sections of posts. The spam bots threaten to overwhelm that dialogue and make the site less pleasant to visit. I hope you folks are putting a plan in place to deal with this.

Thanks,
M_T